Reignite Your Marriage: Biblical Strategies for Lasting Love

Excerpted from Living Your Love Story.

In Song of Solomon chapter 5, our lovebirds had their first fight, and paradise was lost.

The good news is in chapter 6, we see paradise regained. Falling in love is easy; staying in love is a choice. But what do you do when you’ve lost your love for each other?

No doubt you’ve heard the phrase, “Love is a feeling,” as well as the response that it’s more than a feeling. Both statements are true because love is something you feel and something you do. Love is an emotion, but it’s so much more than an emotion—it’s a motion. This is the highest form of love that Scripture talks about repeatedly. It’s God’s love.

The Greeks had several words for love at the time the New Testament was penned by Christ’s apostles. One of the Greek words for love is eros from which we get the word “erotic.” This speaks of the romantic, sexual love felt between a man and a woman. When the New Testament talks about love, it’s almost always agape love, which speaks of Christ’s love for us. It’s a sacrificial kind of love. It’s not a feeling but a choice. Only when agape love is at work in your marriage, will eros be working too. When you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling, choose to put your love in motion to get back the emotion. You need to go back and do the things that made you fall in love. If you wait to feel the emotion, you may never put your love into action. By choosing agape love, eros love will eventually follow. Eros is a feeling, while agape is a choice. This is an important distinction.

You do not always choose to fall in love, but there comes a time in every marriage when you must choose to stay in love. No married couple has ever spent 50 years of uninterrupted marital bliss. There have been some rocky moments and difficult days along the way. The real miracle is not falling in love but staying in love after two people have been staring at each other for 50 years. What is their secret? They chose to stay when it would have been easier to walk away. God blesses that choice by following it with emotion.

Put your love into action, and you’ll get back that lovin’ feeling.

Song of Solomon chapter 6 begins with the Shulamite’s girlfriends asking, “Where has your beloved gone, O fairest among women? Where has your beloved turned aside, that we may seek him with you?” She responds in verses 2-3:

My beloved has gone to his garden, to the beds of spices, to feed his flock in the gardens, and to gather lilies. I am my beloved’s, and my beloved is mine. He feeds his flock among the lilies.

In the verses that follow, Solomon cannot say enough about the love of his life.

O my love, you are as beautiful as Tirzah, lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners!

Tirzah is an oasis in the Judean desert, just outside of Jerusalem. Solomon tells her that she is his oasis. In the middle of the scorching desert, she is like a cool drink of water: “Lovely as Jerusalem, awesome as an army with banners!” He describes his wife as a warrior princess who fights with him in battle.

Life is warfare. Yet, like the stronghold of Jerusalem with its walled fortifications, his wife provides him with a safe place to retreat. In verses 5 and 6, he says:

Turn your eyes away from me, for they have overcome me. Your hair is like a flock of goats going down from Gilead. Your teeth are like a flock of sheep which have come up from the washing; every one bears twins, and none is barren among them.

He is so mesmerized by this woman, that just one look into her eyes makes his heart melt. She has undone her hair, and it is falling on her shoulders. If the next verse sounds familiar, it’s because these are the same words he said to her on their honeymoon night—which tells us that the “honey” is back, and it is a second honeymoon. They have that lovin’ feeling again because they put their love into action.

In chapter 5, he responded to her rejection with affection, which elicited her admiration and set the stage for the restoration of their relationship.

Solomon continues in verses 7 through 9:

Like a piece of pomegranate are your temples behind your veil. There are sixty queens and eighty concubines, and virgins without number. My dove, my perfect one, is the only one, the only one of her mother, the favorite of the one who bore her. The daughters saw her and called her blessed, the queens and the concubines, and they praised her.

Even her temples are sensual and a place of seduction for him. Solomon tells her there may be a lot of other queens and virgins and concubines, but she is the only one he sees. She is far above them all. He does not stop there. He continues in verse 10, saying his beloved is as “fair as the moon, clear as the sun.” Basically, he’s saying her love shines bright, and she lights up his life. After their spat, the Shulamite wants to know if their love is still alive. She is going down to the garden to see if the vineyard is in bloom which is, of course, a euphemism for their sex life.

I went down to the garden of nuts to see the verdure of the valley, to see whether the vine had budded and the pomegranates had bloomed. Before I was even aware, my soul had made me as the chariots of my noble people.

In verse 12, Solomon gives her a place of honor and puts her on a pedestal. No one rode in the king’s chariot without having such an honored position.

Husbands, take note. We are a picture of Solomon and Christ—the Shepherd and the King. As such, we are also to treat our wives like queens by putting them on a pedestal and giving them the highest place of honor.

Husbands, likewise, dwell with them [your wives] with understanding, giving honor to the wife… (1 Peter 3:7).

She is now riding in his chariot, and Solomon and his friends say in verse 13, “Return, return, O Shulamite; return, return that we may look upon you!” They are cheering and praising her for her beauty, honor, and virtue.

We have come to the end of chapter 6, and there are only two chapters left. They have now gone through all the phases of their relationship. From friendship and infatuation to falling in love and getting married to the storming and norming of marriage, we have seen it all. Their love has clearly matured. It’s far beyond mere infatuation with its fickle emotions. It has matured now into true love that will last a lifetime.

We don’t know how long they have been married by the time we get to chapter 6, but it is probably decades. While I have called her the Shulamite from the very beginning of this book, this is the first time she is ever called such in Song of Solomon. Scholars do not agree on the location of Shulem from which she gets this title. Some argue for a location as far away as Lebanon, an ancient kingdom on the Mediterranean immediately north of Israel, whose modern nation still bears its name. Others argue for the town of Shunem, which was in the land grant of Issachar north of Mount Gilboa in the Jezreel Valley.

While the exact location has been lost, we know that Shulamite is a title that means “peaceful.” This woman has brought great peace to Solomon, and they are now at peace with each other.

They have reached a place in their relationship where they are practically what they were already positionally. The moment you get married and say, “I do,” God no longer sees two of you. He only sees one. The goal of every marriage is to become one flesh, not just physically—that is easy—but to truly become one body emotionally, spiritually, and mentally. While it happens instantly in God’s eyes, positionally it takes a lifetime to grow into true oneness as He intended. This couple is now enjoying the fruit of committed love.

It is not a coincidence that Shulamite is the feminine form of the masculine name, Solomon. Similar to Phillip and Phyllis, Daniel and Danielle, or Robert and Roberta. Shulem was a place, but it is also a person. This woman’s title is the “Shulamite,” which no doubt comes from the place of her birth. But more importantly, they share the same name because they share the same heavenly Father. Finally, they are one person—truly living as one body in complete unity.

Chapter 6 concludes with the Shulamite saying, “What would you see in the Shulamite—as it were, the dance of the two camps?” They are seen now as two camps dancing together. After years of marriage, they have mastered the rhythm of marriage—how to move together rather than stumbling all over each other.

They know each other’s moves and what they are going to do even before they do it. They are now moving together as one couple, one family, one body in unity. That is the goal when there has been separation. Their marriage has been restored, and they are enjoying the fruit of their garden of marriage. They have learned how to work through their conflicts. God did not make us cookie-cutter people. We all have our strengths and weaknesses, callings and giftings. God gave them to us to complement each other.